Marine Style

Image of Marine Court, Hastings via

The modern movement was obsessed with maritime imagery from Le Corbusier’s Towards A New Architecture onwards. The 1920's ocean liner lingers on in the architectural imagination as a perfect symbol of modernity; a machine of transportation as well of habitation, divorced from context, floating free of history.

The aesthetic of strip windows, streamlined white balconies, sun decks and terraces defined early modernism in the UK in particular. It brought together a confluence of ideas: a belief in the recuperative properties of fresh air, an early modernist interest in health and efficiency promoted through architecture, the loveliness of the ocean liner and a certain freedom of expression associated with the seaside .

The marine style still retains a strong grip on architect’s imaginations, wheeled out the moment they get a whiff of a site near the sea. There is also a certain architectural fascination with boats generally, a slightly boy-scoutish interest in knots and joints and the way things go together, exemplified by the high tech school.

I was thinking about all this while spending a week at the Great British Seaside. All along the coast are outposts of ocean liner modernism. Two of them - the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and Marine Court (top) in Hastings - are virtually next door to each other but there are numerous others such as Oliver Hill's Midland Hotel in Morecombe, the same architect's Frinton Park Estate in Essex and Joseph Emberton's casino in Blackpool.

Marine Court is an extraordinary building, already well described very well over at Nothing to See Here and Infinite Thought. It was designed in 1936 and very obviously based on an actual ship, the Queen Mary liner. This gives it a slightly surreal literalness as an object, more like a vast public sculpture than a block of flats.



Its current state of dilapidation only adds to the allure, making it appear as if it might have been recently raised from the sea bed. A bit like Hastings itself which has an impressive and unlikely scale to it that dwarfs the little seaside towns that come before and after it along the south east coast.

As Infinite Thought notes, Marine Court is home to psycho-geographer and Audi enthusiast Iain Sinclair. Sinclair also made a short film about it called Marine Court Rendezvous, and described it as being like the hotel from The Shining, full of endless corridors and strange empty apartments. Externally it is also now marooned over charity shops and boarded up restaurants, capturing a peculiarly seaside mix of glamorous aspiration and grim reality.



The De La Warr Pavilion is far better known than Marine Court, having been designed by Erich Mendlesohn with Serge Chermayeff. There is something slightly overstated about its status amongst architects in this country. It's elegant for sure, but less interesting than Mendlesohn's bizarre Einstein Tower in Potsdam, or his fabulous hat factory. A large part of its impact comes from its sheer incongruity. It appears strangely dislocated from its surroundings, like finding a Brancuzi in your Grandmother's living room. What is lovely is the way that the sun deck works, filling up with people in the late afternoon sun when we there, like an Edward Hopper painting come to life.

Both Marine Court and the De-La-Warr look, appropriately enough, as though they might let slip their moorings and drift off at any moment. There is a sense that both these buildings still represent travel and a kind of chic continental glamour, which says a lot more about us than them. Unlike their surroundings they appear to be straining to be part of a European intellectual milieu. This is a major part of their appeal, acting as emblems of a failed future for people who despair of Britain's isolationist tendencies and ingrained philistinism.



The sense of dislocation goes the other way too though. The most radical early modernist buildings in the UK were designed by émigré architects such as Mendelsohn, Gropius and Lubetkin. These were buildings of exile, designed by people who for the most part were only passing through, briefly setting up offices before moving on to the US where modernism would take a very different path.

In a recent post I described the coastal fortifications that occur along the same stretch of coast. Buildings like the De La Warr pavilion are the mirror image of those, a strangely optimistic outcome of the same conflict. Staring out to sea hopefully, its heavily glazed facade and sweeping sun deck couldn't be more different to the slit windows and immense walls of the pillboxes and gun emplacements that are the other architectural remnant of the same period.

Bonus Track

Some years ago we were invited to give a lecture at Carnegie Mellon university in Pittsburgh. It wasn't a great lecture as I recall, slightly scuppered by both the size of the auditorium (enormous) and the running order for the evening which placed us between a contemporary dance troupe and a jazz saxophonist. In such company two English blokes talking about bus shelters and social housing must have seemed fairly bizarre.

Anyway, the highlight of the trip was a visit to two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Pennsylvania: Falling Water and the less well known Kentuck Knob. While Falling Water was clearly an extraordinary piece of architecture, it was Kentuck Knob that was the more interesting for a number of reasons. The house was (and may well still be) owned by Baron (then Lord) Peter Palumbo. Palumbo collected iconic modernist houses in the same way that you or I might collect DVD box sets. At the time he also owned Mies Van Der Rohe's Farnsworth House and the Maisons Jaoul by Le Corbusier. Rumour has it that Palumbo had planned to buy Falling Water to complete the set but was scuppered by the fact that the Kaufman family had left it to the Pennsylvania National Park. So he bought the nearby Kentuck Knob instead.

Kentuck Knob is run as a visitor attraction with Palumbo living in a farmhouse nearby when in residence. There is a book and souvenir shop at the gate and a little bus that drives you through the woods to the house itself which sits at the top of Chestnut Ridge. The grounds that the bus passes through are a sort of high art amusement park peppered with sculptures by Andy Goldsworthy and Claus Oldenburg as well as random 20th Century artefacts including a section of the Berlin wall and a K2 telephone box.



The house itself couldn't be more different to its celebrated neighbour. It is a Usonian house, a single storey, relatively modest ground hugging building with a large overhanging roof. The plan is sort of rhomboid-ish, two squished rectangles at one hundred and twenty degrees to each other with an odd faceted kitchen at the centre between the two. The interior is finely honed and beautifully made, quietly impressive rather than spectacular.

Palumbo had been responsible for carefully renovating the interior and furnishing it with FLW designed pieces. Despite the thoroughness of this exercise the interior also featured a number of incongruously personal objects belonging to the owner. So, sitting on one immaculate Frank Lloyd Wright designed table was a framed photo of Baron Palumbo proudly presenting Margaret Thatcher with one of those foam mounted giant cheques used for charity fund raising. Next to it was another photo of him chatting to Princess Diana.

Palumbo himself appeared at one moment, wandering through the kitchen during our guided tour in a pair of green Hunter wellingtons and smoking a cigar. He stopped briefly to tell a short and slightly pompous story about (for some reason) George Bernard Shaw before ambling off to empty a wheelbarrow full of leaves.

I was reminded of all this after reading this excellent article (via @tragedyhatherle's twitter feed) which describes Lloyd Wright's various LA houses. The article describes Frank Lloyd Wright's particular and characteristically eccentric approach to building houses on hills. Like the Ennis House, Kentuck Knob could be described very well as being "of the hill" rather than on it. As well as being embedded in the site to the extent that large rocks are incorporated into the facade itself, the house is positioned just off the tip of the ridge on which it sits. Although the view from the ridge is impressive, Lloyd Wright deliberately positioned the house so that it wasn't visible from within.

The perversity of this move is admirable, although it arises from a belief that architecture should not compete with nature. Jeffrey St Claire's conclusion in his counterpunch article that the technically challenged Ennis House should be left to be reclaimed by nature is both interesting and provocative. Kentuck Knob, with its strange garden of artefacts and equally curious back story as the plaything of a wealthy semi-exiled English Lord would make an equally compelling ruin.

Modern Girls, Modern Boys; It's Tremendous!*

More of a checking-in than a proper post, brought about by a brief return to London to attend my brother's wedding, a splendid affair not even ruined by my reading of a Norman MacCaig poem, that ended up in the venue pictured above, the wonderful Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley. This fabulous ex-cinema (formerly the Crofton Park Picture Palace) was converted to a dance hall in 1957 and has one of the most beautiful interiors I've ever been in: plush red velvet, gold leaf ceiling, Chinese lanterns, a neon-deco facade and jive dancing. Not even the fact that Oasis played there has dulled its unabashedly vulgar glamour.

I flew in to City airport the night before. This has the most thrilling approach of any airport I've flown to (save perhaps for the now defunct Templehof in Berlin where the plane seemed to take the tiles off the apartment blocks on the way down) made even more impressive on this occasion by the steep ascent the plane had to take when another plane stopped on the runway in front of it. The following 360 degree swoop over the Thames afforded a sublime view that took in the mouth of the estuary, the Queen Elizabeth 11 Dartford Crossing, Tilbury Docks, the Isle of Dogs and the Millennium dome simmering hazily in the distance.

A few years ago when I was teaching at Greenwich University I set a project that involved taking a boat trip from Greenwich to Gravesend. I've been fascinated by that stretch of the river ever since with its vast container ships and mysterious sheds lurking on the edge of the marshland. It's a landscape captured by Jock Macfadyen in paintings like Pink Flats (below) and slated to disappear under the Thames Gateway development.



The trip was a mirror image of a second boat journey from Reading to Henley, a stretch of the river with a completely different mythology that takes in Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, Jerome K Jerome's Three Men In A Boat and a kind of English surrealist whimsy culminating for me in Mike (Archigram) Webb's bizarre Temple Island project. This fantasy project starts off as a series of doctored photographs of the Henley Regatta and mutates into the design of a strange, mutant submersible that travels up the Thames to Temple Island and the small Doric temple that sits on it.

Webb's project evokes the English picturesque and Sunday watercolourist's sensibility combined with something odder and more psychedelic. It's certainly one of the strangest projects ever to come out of the Archigram group, up there with David Greene's experimental Bottery and Webb's own Dreams Come True Inc. Like them, the Temple Island project took Archigram's twin loves of technology and English pastoralism but minus the boy scout positivism, replacing it with an altogether darker, more satirical sensibility.



I'll end this scattergun posting with a few links. There has been a series of superb posts over at Sit Down Man, including, especially, this one on Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and a sustained and angry rant on Southampton. Also good is The Sesquipedalist on why he twitters, which I have to say captures my ambivalent self-loathing on that topic spookily well. He also has a photo post on Sheffield's wonderful Castle Market, recently written up by Owen at Nothing to See Here (see links opposite).

I had my lunch at Sharon's cafe (ham, egg and chips since you ask) recently prior to a planning meeting for our Sheffield housing scheme. I can recommend it for all sorts of reasons, not least for its super compacted multi-programmed spatial qualities (Castle Market that is, not Sharon's ham, egg and chips) and the nicely expressed futurist style exhaust funnel that sticks out the top (ditto).


(photo courtesy of Mr Parnell)

I'm off to Bottany Bay, amongst other places, for the next week so will hopefully return with the blogger's de rigueur holiday post, as well as some other more edifying thoughts.

* BTW, the post title is a quote from Gregory's Girl which captures the film's decidedly modern optimism. I watched this the other day as part of a mini Scottish culture festival I have going on in my house which also includes listening to Stuart Murdoch's God Help The Girl ("Old episodes of Minder, I snuggled up beside her") and reading Simon Reynold's interview with a suprisingly call a spade a spade-ish Edwyn Collins in Totally Wired: Post Punk Interviews and Overviews.